Production control of a manufacturing system subject to deterioration

• Published in: Proceedings of the 44th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control pp. 4670 - 4675
• Main Authors: Martinelli, F., Piedimonte, F.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2005
• Subjects: Continuous production; Control systems; Costs; Failure analysis; Feedback; Manufacturing systems; Optimal control; Product safety; Production control; Switches
• ISBN: 9780780395671; 0780395670
• ISSN: 0191-2216
• DOI: 10.1109/CDC.2005.1582899

In this paper we consider a control problem for a manufacturing system comprising a single machine subject to a deterioration process. The system produces a single part type and the model is fluid. The objective is to minimize a long term average cost index which penalizes both inventory surplus and backlog. The machine deterioration rate depends on the production rate and a maintenance operation is performed when the deterioration reaches a specified alarm level. In this paper it is shown that the optimal control operates the machine alternating the maximum production capacity with idle or conservative periods (policy μ-d-μ) if the machine deterioration rate is a concave function of the production rate while it is a continuous feedback function of the buffer level if the deterioration rate is convex. This confirms the results obtained in the past for Markov failure prone systems.